True Poems Flee

To See a Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -- True Poems Flee -- Emily Dickinson

All created on Prince Edward Island, these photographs are a visual memoir that is about my grieving for my mother, as it also suggests something about a way of life that was hers and, in significant ways, my own.

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I run down to the shore – if running is the right word, as I clumsily juggle my tripod and camera and concern myself with not tripping on a jutting root or turning my ankle in a divot in the bumpy ground -- and hope to get there in time to make a picture of that perfect cloud formation. But then those clouds move to the east and a ray of light appears, and a new scene, a new poem, appears… then flees almost as quickly as it appeared, maybe before I can make the picture. I wait… and keep photographing. Is there one even better moment still to come?

The fog settles into a valley, or hovers silently over a pond, creating mystery, evoking memories, and touching my heart as I feel again a certain sadness, a mourning, a familiar ache. I am reluctant to leave. Who can leave such beauty? And such mystery? But soon, the fog will dissipate, not unlike Dickinson’s summer day, and so I had best go on. My self-appointed work, after all, is to create pictures.

In some images, houses sit, perfectly placed, it feels to me, in the landscape, holding their own stories, holding memories of our mothers and our childhoods. They sit well in front of the horizon, which matters beyond measure. Whether as sharp as a drawn line or nearly invisible, the horizon demands my attention. But why? Is it because it implies both the finite and the infinite – for isn’t there something beyond the line, however indistinct? And where exactly is that horizon? And since we can never get there, how can we get to the beyond? Perhaps that is what these photographs are about – they help me get to what lies beyond.

Archival pigment prints:

21" x 14", limited edition of 10 prints

33" x 22", limited edition of 3 prints

As the Day Breaks from Night

Between the Light and Me

First Light

In Your Own Sweet Way

I Call Your Name

True Poems Flee

Rhapsody in Blue

Sound of Silence

Tenderly

Untitled (Scales Pond)

The Mist of Emyvale

On the Way to Kinkora

When Fog Lifts

O Canada

A Room of Her Own

I Remember This

What Fog Reveals

Home, Sweet Home

Tell the Truth, but Tell it Slant

In Between

Being Here

An Affair of Awe

Places for the Spirit

“Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens” is a series of photographs that I made of African American gardens and portraits of the people who created them. A book of over 80 of these photographs was published in 2010 by Trinity University Press.

The yards have a unique landscape aesthetic that is historically significant; design elements of the gardens, and their spiritual meanings, have been traced to the cultural practices of African American slaves and farther back to their West African heritage.

I was drawn to the gardens by their beauty and their cultural and aesthetic significance. Photographing, reading, and talking with the gardeners, I learned a great deal about the traditions these yards carry on: they are designed to welcome visitors, to elicit respect, and promise safety; within the yards are material objects with symbolic meanings – such as bottles, pipes, the color white, or circular objects – that are placed there to capture evil spirits, to provide a way for ancestors to communicate with the living, to invoke the deity, to reassure the visitor that despite hardship, progress will occur.

In these yards we see the gardeners’ reverence for the cycles of life and nature, for the presence of the spiritual, and for the value of community.

“ Looking at these black and white images sometimes feels like dropping paper flowers in a glass of water and watching them expand. Vaughn Sills’s images make the mind expand like a rose, fragrant with vision…. [Her] humility in the face of the order she finds in these various gardens is touching – and enlightening.” --Hilton Als

Archival Pigment Prints:

19.5" x 16" , limited edition of 5 prints

17" x 14" limited edition of 5 prints

Pearl Fryar's Garden, Bishopville, South Carolina

Pearl Fryar, Bishopville, South Carolina

Inez Faust, Backyard, Ogelthorpe County, Georgia

Inez Faust, Ogelthorpe County, Georgia

Alexander Bell's Garden, Greenville, North Carolina

Emma Moore's Yard, near Marion, Alabama

Bea Robinson, Athens, Georgia

Anniebelle Sturghill's Garden, Athens, Georgia

Anniebelle Sturghill, Athens, Georgia

Louise Daniel's House and Garden, Greenville, North Carolina

Alfred Lee Johnson's Backyard, Eutaw, Alabama

David Washington's Garden, New Orleans, Louisiana

Ella Steward's Yard, Ogelthorpe County, Georgia

Jame Cox, Ogelthorpe County, Georgia

Jame Cox's Garden, Ogelthorpe County, Georgia

One Family

Over a period of twenty years, I made portraits and collected the stories of four generations of one family, the Tooles of northeastern Georgia. Theirs is a story of hardship, perseverance, and love. Lois and Joel, who both grew up in families who had worked as tenant farmers, were in their forties and had had nine children, with the oldest 25 and the youngest seven when I met them. Tina, the youngest daughter was nine when I began photographing them in 1979; and in the years I continued to photograph and record the family history, she grew up, married, had a child, divorced, and remarried; Tina also became her mother Lois’s primary caretaker during the last years of Lois's life. In my book of the Tooles, One Family, Tina becomes the central figure, while her mother draws nearly equal attention. But equally important are Tina’s brothers and sisters, whose individual stories and portraits reveal their experiences, and show the depth of love and care they hold for each other, their parents, and their children -- with a devotion that is profound.

One Family, Georgia University Press, was published in 2001.

Silver prints, 20" x 16", editions limited to ten prints

Tasha, 1993

Lois with two granddaughters, 1979

Joe, Lois and Jerry, 1988

Tina, Tasha, and Lynn, 1990

Lois, Tina, and Tasha, 1990

Frank and Jerry, 1990

Mary and Justin, 1990

Tina and Lois, 1993

Angela with Chellsey, 1995

Angela, with her children, Chellsey and Christin, and Lynn's children, Nichole, Courteney and Ashlynn, 1996

Suszan, Melodie, Mickey, and Michael, 1996

Lois, Joe and Kerry's Home, 1990

Inside Outside

Grown in a garden or a greenhouse, the flowers I photograph have been cultivated, nurtured, cut, brought inside, and placed in vases -- they are representations of domesticity and the human urge to create beauty. Behind them are my photographs of the natural world, whether land or sea, wild or cultivated; in this juxtaposition, the domestic becomes a part of the natural world – distinct but not different. In the making of these images, I both acknowledge and attempt to deny that these signs of life are forever changing, passing away from us. My goal is to create in each image a layered manifestation of beauty, memory, and the ephemeral.

Archival pigment prints:

21" x 14", limited edition of 10 prints

32" x 21", limited edition of 5 prints

Tulips, Northumberland Strait

Ranunculus, Northumberland Strait

Delphinium, Wright's Pond

Stargazer Lilies, Northumberland Strait

Stargazer Lily (white and pink), Northumberland Strait

Sunset Rose, Emyvale

Double Bloom Tulips, Northumberland Strait

Stargazer Lilies, North Wiltshire

Beyond Words

I have chosen objects from nature one by one, found them, dug them, preserved them – a squirrel’s skeleton, poplar saplings that sprout from one long root, broken egg shells lying on the forest floor. I have taken them, or been given them, from the land on Prince Edward Island where my grandparents visited each summer, where I now have a cottage. I chose these things because of their extraordinary beauty – and because they seem to hold the mystery of life and death.

My family’s 1932 Oxford English Dictionary seduces me with its promise to teach, to offer knowledge, even to dispel mystery. But entrancing as it is, leading me from one word to the next, this well-used book lets me down. Words are incomplete; they fall short of conveying the miraculous presence of a squirrel’s skeleton, the complexity of a bird’s nest, the delicacy of a moth. Six letters – l, u, p, i n, e – represent the tall stemmed purple, pink, yellow and white flowered perennials whose palmated leaves turn a dusty grayish green then brown, giving way to hairy seed pods that lyrically soften the late afternoon sun by the middle of August. The word ‘lupine’ doesn’t convey what I see and love, but neither does my long string of words. A word cannot even describe the beauty of a book.

Nevertheless I need the words: they matter: they name what I see, they describe a color, a shape, an action, an attribute. Thus in my photographs I wish to portray the lure and beauty of language itself.

I have brought together objects from nature that exist outside my cottage with my dictionary, the world of our intellect. And with these I offer the artifice – the wire and pushpins and tape and thread, though sometimes barely visible – of my effort to comprehend and represent, as well as to suggest the fragility of such efforts. The construction itself has become interesting to me; it is the grammar with which I work. And yet each tableau, like each object, is delicate and cannot last. The plants will die without soil, the skeletons will fall apart, the threads will let go. The pages of the dictionary will continue to yellow; the binding, continue to loosen. Like my dreams, my beloved signs of life will eventually disappear.

The photographs are made from 4x5 Polaroid negatives and are archival Iris prints. They are available for exhibition or purchase.

25” x 20” limited editions of 10 prints, Archival Iris Prints

32” x 25” limited editions of 5 prints, Archival Iris Prints

Indan Pipe, Beyond Words

Crabs, Beyond Words

Squirrel, Beyond Words

Seeds of Thistle, Beyond Words

Landscape, Beyond Words

Poppy Seeds, Beyond Words

Birds, Beyond Words

Shell, Beyond Words

Nest, Beyond Words

Mushroom, Beyond Words

Past and Present

In these images, I am exploring the relationship between past and present in my life; using both old and new photographs and writing from diaries, letters, essays, or even scraps of paper, I am making photographs about the integration of memory and experience, of what was and what is.

Some of the pieces are straight prints without manipulation — perhaps feeling more “present” — although they sometimes show the aberrations of film. While in others, selective toning is used in a way to suggest the complexity of, even confusion within, experience. Altogether, this work is about the ambiguity between one’s expectations and the realities of one’s life, the mingling of past and present, the beautiful and the ordinary. The past is not different in power or in temporal meaning than the present.

The prints are from a larger series of about 20 images; they are selectively toned silver prints, 16” x 20”, 1983-1986.